Frankfurt 2011

The CBM experiment is a fixed target experiment to be installed at the future accelerator facil-ity at GSI/FAIR. It will investigate the properties of nuclear matter at extreme conditions and its underlying strong interaction. The research of the CBM experiment, which focuses on the regime of highest net-baryon densities and moderate temperatures, is complementary to this of the experiments at RHIC/BNL (STAR) and LHC/CERN (ALICE), which mainly focuses on the regime of high energy and zero net-baryon densities. The corresponding conditions in the CBM experiment can be produced in heavy-ion collisions at beam energies between 10 and 40 AGeV. Heavy particles, as e.g. charm carrying particles, could be sensitive to the properties of the medium in the early phase of the collision. However due to the short lifetime of open charm particles, they can only be reconstructed via their decay products and the corresponding track topology. Consequently in order to reconstruct the decay vertex with a high accuracy an ultra-thin detector system with excellent spatial resolution is required. Due to the high particle fluxes expected, additional requirements to the rate capabilities as well as to the radiation hardness are set